Predicting and Preventing Slum Growth: Theory, Method, Implementation and Evaluation

This book provides a framework for understanding, predicting and preventing informal settlements growth in fast urbanizing developing countries' cities. The book depicts the concepts and theories of informal settlements, modeling and simulation and urban planning. The book explains why despite past and current informal settlements policies and projects, slums are flourishing in many cities in developing countries. The book argues and demonstrates that unless slum can be anticipated or predicted, and prevention strategies embedded in policies and interventions, many cities will have no other options than to see the share of chaotic urbanization grows. In this book, GIS and modeling techniques through cellular automata are used to successful demonstrate how informal settlements can be predicted and simulated based on several scenarios. Simulation and modeling data are useful for slum growth strategies and policies. The Informal Settlement Growth Model is applied in Yaound¿, Cameroon. The model is innovative, free, entirely transparent, flexible, relatively simple and, consequently, laden with potential for furthering our understanding of the daunting informal settlements problem.